Apple Pay use online soars shortly after debut

Apple Pay on the web launched in late September, and even though it is available on noticeably fewer websites than its competitors, it still outranks Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, and more than 50 other online payment technologies. SimilarTech, which tracks more than 30 billion web pages each month, shows that Apple’s payments technology is the fifth most popular online payment platform used by the Top 10,000 websites that it tracks. It also holds that fifth position when the sample is expanded to the Top 100,000 websites.

Mobile payments has been on the horizon for years before major tech companies like Apple, Google, and Samsung put it into the market. Now, research predicts that half of consumers will be using phones or wearables for mobile payments by 2018, thanks to innovations in phones and payments services.

Apple Pay is now available in 12 markets, including Australia, China and Russia. In the US, nearly 90 percent of all contactless transactions are made with the service.